The growing phenomenon of Social Software seems to provide an opportunity to complement the top-down approach based on central knowledge repositories with tools that are simpler, smarter and more flexible. This article in-cludes a brief description of the main categories of Social Software – weblogs, wikis and social networking sites - fol-lowed by an analysis of their utilisation in relation to the five core Knowledge Management activities of the Knowledge Management taxonomy proposed by Despres & Chauvel in 1999. Examples that illustrate the support Social Software could provide for knowledge management are presented. Finally, some of the problems that hinder the usage of Social Software tools, together with some of the latest developments and trends in the field are mentioned.

As part of a research project dedicated to the Social Organizational and Cultural Aspects of Global Software Development, the author has chosen to focus on collaborative work practices and knowledge management aspects of ...

In this paper we examine sprint-driven software development as it occurs in a specific Open Source community, PyPy. Applying a situated learning perspective, we report the findings from a study focused
on the activities ...

In a globalised world economy, small and mediumsized companies (SMEs) are now entering the global software engineering (GSE) arena, but their involvement is more often opportunistic than carefully
planned. Considered until ...

This paper outlines the needs for careful empirical-design choices during the study of software practitioners. It does this by presenting a documented, but unpublished, in-vivo, empirical, group study. The study was initially ...